Ok, things are looking up now. I found the spell "Earth Eruption" by pure chance in the northeastern snowy mountains and that thing does 3k area dmg (including booster cards), costing me 550 mana a pop. (I have ~2,5k)

That is what i call a actually useful spell. One of these plus some minor violence kills most regular enemies. (Yes, that's how much HP everyone has. Hitting regular enemies with it reduces their health by like 99%, leaving me to chop off their leftover 50 HP by hand,)

It also illustrates again just how useless most other spells are. A firebolt does 50 points of damage. Fifty. +10 for every card i stack on it and +20% if i apply the apropriate booster card.

Against enemies with 3000+ HP.

Even the very first enemies i encountered in the game had like 600 HP.

This is just pathetic... but at least i lucked out now and got something useful. :|

Edit: I take that back. I wandered a little further down on the west coast and encountered Fire Skeletons, who are not only completely immune to that spell, but also appear to have 20k HP. I don't... wha?

Did you encounter them in a cave, or just wandering around? Sometimes enemies in caves are simply too hard for you at the current time. You can come back to that cave when you've got more powerful spells.

By the way, I noticed something as I've been playing some more. I headed down towards Clovely Fishing Village, on the beaches on the west coast. Nearby, there were quite a lot of Scapulari (crab-people) and their Shamans almost universally carried the Ice Bolt spell card. So now I have like 20 Ice Bolt spell cards, which is much, much more than I've found for any other projectile spell. I'm not sure how powerful that will actually make the spell when stacked (if it's like firebolt, maybe not that much), but it might be a good place to start looking if you want a decent projectile spell. Also, as an ice bolt, it should work fine against those Fire Skeletons.

1. It was a cave, so that may have been the reason. But those crab-people took a metric ton of damage as well (~20k HP), so i'm not quite sure what's going on there. (For the skeletons i ultimately went through there with Destroy Undead, which does ~1,5k dmg for pocket change.)

2. Yeah, i found those cards as well and stacked them testing-wise, but after a certain amount they start to have a 1:1 damage to mana translation (200 mana for 200 damage) and downwards, which is crap. Low-level spells aren't worth stacking that high, i think. :/

Related: Poison spells? Pretty useless. Not only do they little damage, they also do it slowly. I got a ton of poison bolt cards when i crawled around a necromancer tower and got a skeleton horse in addition out of it. No idea what these guys were doing there. >_>

The thing about the crab people down south is that they drop their hearts, which when combined into 10 per potion (highest level alchemy needed), will give you + 45 vitality. This (after getting about 60 hearts) makes the game much more forgiving, and you can get away with taking a few more risks. I'm afraid it's the old area effect circling tactic to win it, however the big ones that actually drop the hearts have 2 weaknesses. They are slow with no range attack, so you can deal with the others first. Also if caught in field of fire, they cannot get out of it. You can literally herd 20 of them into one focus point. I know you don't like the running away, but those guys need it.

Poison bolt is once again a waste, however poison cloud rocks. You should be able to get an enemy / all enemies down to all green within a few casts. The trick then is not to stop. I tend to poisen them to about 200% to 300% of their damage, then you cast the death hands spell (they are paralysed, but continue to take poison damage) and go and deal with someone else. Even the final demon guy was easily taken down by that.

I think I've been to that same cave... wasn't too hard with my fighter character but the fire skeletons were on the tougher side. Not too far from there, however, I found a cave that was full of headless dudes and demons. THOSE were tough... killed me in one hit, although I was able to dodge their attacks for a while. But they had so much HP that it was a hopeless fight. I'll have to head back there later when I'm more powerful.

I'm sorry the ice bolt stacking doesn't really work out. Good to know that destroy undead is pretty useful though.